The AntiChristmas

The Flaneur notes the current degree of morbidity in Hollywood's exploitation of the disaffected.

At Christmas this grotesque billboard showed up in low-income Hispanic neighborhoods where the majority of people venerate Mary as they celebrate the birth of Jesus. 

Along Telegraph avenue on Berkeley's south side, there was less to be said.

Same building.
A cool guy in a blue leather biker jacket walked into the shot.

Crown Beach Christmas

The Flaneur tunneled out to Alameda for a Christmas Day peaceful and mild

Coots aplenty congregate on the expansive lawns 

yet another splendid day showing signs of drought

I brought a Yuletide picnic of roast chicken & yams, olives, triscuits,

 and most delightful of all a large bottle of Santa's Little Helper imperial stout

The Bay was as calm as the sea at Cadaques

the water's membrane was like a silky rug

A lonesome conga player iterated at the marina

when he stopped the silence was all-encompassing

To the East a father and son with an electric wand

searched for precious metal in the sand

And in among the wild reeds a little barefoot girl 

her purpose as instinctual as the birds overhead

She performed a ritual dance with the dry reeds

in front of an immensity with no horizon

 For a moment the girl, the reeds, and the immensity

comprised the whole world

She selected just the right reeds with great care

and then she disappeared again

Running down the beach with her reeds

as industrious as any creature building a nest

Curiosity naturally prevailed

I  ventured in toward the other side of the reeds

There stood an elegant teepee

or was it an abstract Christmas tree?

The sculptress herself cast a geometric figure

seemed happy I was there to see her work

A deep peace descended on all of us

as we went our separate ways in the silence

This was of course her Christmas celebration and blessing

and I carry it on here in transit to you

Afterwards things turned chiaroscuro 

and the coots took shelter in the shadows

Across from the Coast Guard recruiting station 

 I waited for a bus alone with the Evening Star

25 December 2013

Miscellaneous Miracles

The Flaneur salutes his luminous lecteurs with some bijoux from the numinous notebook.






Mislabeled bats
show up and eat the cat's food
the cat doesn't like it
but is afraid of the bat's place
in the hallowe'en hierarchy




haunted by my father's death
I grew to cherish hauntedness





a long line of geese
     over a line of kayaks
subtle migrations




Coral forms over my eyes
until I'm walking around with
fish bowl sea horse eyebrow castles


all of this builds and builds
until I'm left with a dime store
mount rushmore on my shoulders





Cold Mount Diablo

foothills like ponies
     in the palomino earth
ghostly moon of bone





To thine own self be weird

Solstice 2013

Recent Experience of Vertigo

Perhaps a dozen viewings into this classic of the bizarre, I am still realizing things about it.

In youthful glimpses of it on B&W TV, I remember not really getting it. By the time it was rereleased in the 1980s I had become a Hitchcock aficionado having published an essay on his TV program in an Anthology from City Lights. I had read quite a bit on Vertigo and was psyched  for the grand re-opening at a San Francisco movie house. Hitch owned the city once again.

That was probably the only other viewing besides my latest in which the audio was up to the magnificent score by Bernard Herrmann. This is pure cinema and it consists almost entirely of sound and vision not dramatic dialog and the score is utterly predominant.

Herrmann is a madman and a genius and this is a film of amour fou, of mad love.

What I learned that was new in terms of the soundtrack was due to the fact that I wore ear-buds. From the first one couldn’t help but notice that there are huge segments of the film with no dialogue; what I noticed this time was that even when there was dialog it was exceedingly quiet and moreover it subordinated to the musical score. The volume of the score doesn’t subside in order to hear the talking.

I have long owned the score on LP and it alone is a transporting art experience, with Hitch’s opulent Hollywood hyper-romanticism it is of course one of the headiest drafts in film history. A t once a lugubrious Douglas Sirk romance and a disquieting exposition of the psychopathology of everyday life worthy of Bunuel.

The other remarkable  innovation accompanying this viewing was my first look at the so-called “Foreign censorship ending.”

What an astonishment it is and what a missing piece of the puzzle.

What follows is my own theory of the movie and the reveal at the end is the “censorship ending.”

Scottie is a charming narcissist with gentle but strong presumption of imperious male privilege. He has had sexual relations with Midge but managed to extricate himself from their engagement. (Now he just enjoys her domestic comforts without the ring or the sex.)  He thinks nothing of dangling this fact before her adding that she was the one to break it off. The close-ups of her face tell a different story.

This is Scottie’s real moral guilt --not that some foolhardy cop died in a bootless attempt to rescue him

Then comes the highly implausible plot in which Kim is the macguffin mannikin. I won’t dwell on how absurd it is that a former friend would further damage him to that extent in order to pull off a Rube Goldberg fake suicide of his wife plot. He is the sadistic agent of the cruel fate that Scotties can’t escape. This is a morality play in the form of a “murder mystery.”

His sexual obsession for the shop girl turned actress, who adopts obvious poses in front of her dead doppelganger’s portrait or in the window of her house, is the plot. Her mystical slippage a the display of tree rings foreshadows Dark Shadows, yet gullible Scottie commits for the ride.

He goes quite mad after the actual wife’s body falls in front of him. I find his semi-animated nightmare sequence very effective and quite terrifying.

(note: I have experience severe vertigo and have had a loved one die in  fall).

midge’s final scene in the official film is really very sad--she’s alone in a clinic corridor and admits to herself he’s never coming back.

So then  with the promptness of narrative of a fairytale, he somewhat recovers, bumps into Kim’s character in the street and lets the fugue state he is in set an obsessive tone.

Then not only does she agree to get to know him, and submit to the makeover but--what was I thinking?!--she wears the Carlotta brooch.

Right after they finally had sex too.

The chandelier-like brooch is difficult to miss by someone with an Asbergers-esque obsession over her appearance.

Does her call the cops? No he decides to extract brutal revenge. The image of her high-heeled feet being dragged-up the steeple staircase is all you need.

In the censorship ending we see Midge again. She is listening to the radio that reports that the guy who set Scottie up is being sought in Europe for his crimes.

Then Scottie comes in. Without speaking she makes them two big drinks. Scottie goes to the window to stare out. She sits back contentedly. She’s got her man back.

A Message

Hiya E,

Thought of you today, yr observation that Oakland is a tinderbox,

when I saw SF Chron headline -- curfew for under 18-year-olds in Oakland.

They wild.

After the Trayvon verdict it really felt dicey in the streets.

Now Sears & other places are leaving the boards up not replacing windows--adds to the apocalyptic.

And big "Fruitvale" billboards rippled overhead above that as the helicopters remained parked in the sky.

One of the reasons I keep a somewhat scruffy look.

 Hostile teenagers may not respect you but they figure you're a scrub, not enough $ to risk robbing.

Not like the O.cops are hard at work to prevent or catch such activity.

Remember my Mexicali Rose neon photo?.

I ignored them not to attract unwanted attention but right across the street when I took that photo

there were riot-gearish cops just hanging out in case the Police State complex came under attack.

While waiting for you on the street a bus drove past loaded with prisoners, cold iron bound

Yrs, StR

Ferry Boat Ray

The Flaneur heads down to Jack London Square and takes advantage of a Clipper discount card to traverse the Bay on the Oakland Ferry this summer of 2013.

The exhilarating crossing begins slow as you crawl past container ships the size of big city buildings. Alongside the Ferry Pier resides FDR's yacht The Potomac. One evening in late July, I was aboard it for a small bluegrass show by Blue & Lonesome. There was fine wine and I took a moment alone on the upper deck to smoke my spliff where Roosevelt and Churchill snorted alcohol in copious amounts. FDR reached it by a one-man elevator which he operated himself by hand.
Below the main deck were two restored and furnished bedrooms. One was for Franklin and his girlfriend; the other one was for Eleanor and her girlfriend.

On a recent visit to Aquatic Park SF via the Oakland Ferry to Pier 41, I was just retiring to some terraced steps for a picnic when I observed two maybe foreign guys focusing in on an unsuspecting girl's private spot while she was sunbathing. With a telephoto lens no less.

I alerted the girl. 

Cads!  By-standing males would beat them up if they tried it elsewhere.

(More to come)

Through the Looking Glass

Hasty dispatch from the moving sidewalks of Berkeley to Oakland.

Hardly a raid on the inarticulate, yet herein the Flaneur attempts to recall a moment of inchoate happenstance.

As a local expression of the summer heat wave, I have employed visits to the cooler environs of Jack London Square to relax some evenings.
There I was on a recent night as an outdoor exhibition of a recent film took place. On a lawn alongside restaurants with outdoor fire pits an inflatable screen had been set up, its frame a tubular deal giving it roughly the shape of an etch-a-sketch.
An elevated patio above the rest rooms etc. afforded me a dignified seat away from the crowd to have smoke and enjoy the crepuscular bay side atmosphere as pleasure craft came back to dock contently. It's quite a prospect to wait until it's dark enough to comfortably show a film outdoors a few nights after the solstice. Impatience prevailed naturally enough when after a quiz and a raffle the mob felt it had collectively waited enough and a booming male voice introduced the film.
I grabbed a spot on the lawn as close as was practical and settled in for what was turning out to be a slightly chilly spot despite the heat of the day.
The film started with a blurt, the video control semiotics visible over the picture with a women's voice-over described what was being shown on-screen for the benefit of those without sight. Prolonged giggling ensued as even the simultaneity of twitchy warthogs was noted in the obtrusive narration rapidly interspersed with a recitation of the credits as they passed by.
Fortunately the night had fallen a bit further by the time they stopped and restarted the film, the screen became more legible as it went on.
It is a enough pleasant film and just right for this family-centered crowd with its relative smattering of hipsters and bystanders like me. Some of its clever-cute spiritual jingoism and the over-long "revelation" of its ending might not have been missed by this viewer. Moreover though it is a well-wrought use of so much CGI it is left with that nagging irreal feeling when it wants to be at its most naturalistic. And some sequences such as Richard Parker the tiger pounces on the heinous hyena are so abrupt as to be incomplete--as in what exactly happened to the hyena's corpse? Swallowed in one bite?
But it was loose enough to allow the attention of the young crowd  to wander and then draw them back in at the thrilling moments. I suspect many of them had already seen the film as well. Some young folks quite close to the screen were noticeably slapstick in their antics. A tall young guy with a wild "natural" hairdo was bounding around while still sheathed in a sleeping bag like  a cartoon. Sitting next to me were a Sino-American couple who had brought their alert looking little terrier. The dog watched every outlandish behavior with calm forbearance.
Then as the film's bestial soundtrack roared to a crescendo, the rodeo-clown kid came running down some stairs behind the screen to dive toward the scrum of sleeping bags. The dog barked a single loud bark in admonition and everyone froze for a second. It was as if it was one last adrenaline-inducing thrill, one more of the many vivid animal sounds in "The Life of Pi." The tall kid was momentarily spooked, and then the tension resolved in general laughter and merriment. A sweet looking young black girl and I exchanged a twinkly look and everybody rose to go.
"I thought that he looked like a smart dog," I told his proud owner.